October 13, 2024
by Carla Hay
Directed by John Crowley
Culture Representation: Taking place from 2013 to 2023, mostly in London, the dramatic film “We Live in Time” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few black people and Asian people) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: A chef and a cereal company marketer meet under unusual circumstances, fall in love, and have ups and downs in their relationship, including an ovarian cancer diagnosis.
Culture Audience: “We Live in Time” will appeal mainly to people who are fans of stars Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh and romantic dramas about couples coping with a cancer diagnosis.
“We Live in Time” tells an engaging, non-chronological story of a couple affected by cancer. The movie tends to gloss over many physical effects of cancer, but the charismatic performances from Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh make this drama worthwhile. People who don’t like non-linear stories might be confused by all the timeline jumping in the film, but the scenes from the couple’s lives together aren’t as diffcult to follow as one might think, since the ovarian cancer diagnosis is revealed early on in the movie.
Directed by John Crowley and written by Nick Payne, “We Live in Time” had its world premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. “We Live in Time” has a story that takes place from 2013 to 2023, mostly in London. Even though the couple’s romance takes place during this 10-year period, you can’t really tell it’s this long, because the two lovers never seem to age at all. “We Live in Time” needed more realistic makeup and hairstyling to show the aging process of people who are supposed to age from their 30s to their 40s.
In “We Live in Time,” chef/restaurateur Almut Brühl (played by Pugh) and cereal company marketer Tobias Durand (played by Garfield) are a live-in couple who are seen in the beginning of the movie in an idyllic romantic scene. Almut has made Douglas fir parfait for Tobias and is serving it to him, just as he has woken up in bed. It’s all very lovey-dovey. But flashbacks and flash-forwards from this scene show that the relationship between Almut and Tobias has had its share of conflicts and sadness.
The story unfolds to reveal that in 2013, when Almut and Tobias met, she was 34 years old and had a new restaurant with cuisine that she describes to him as “modern European takes on classic Alpine dishes—basically Anglo-Bavarian.” Tobias, approximately in his late 30s at the time he met Almut, is a marketer for Weetabix. He appears in TV ads for the company, so he is sometimes called Mr. Weetabix as an endearing nickname.
One evening, Tobias is in a London hotel room for a business meeting he’s having on an unnamed day. He has just received paperwork to sign to make his divorce final from a woman named Helen, who is never seen in the movie. Just as he’s about to sign the divorce papers, Tobias finds out that every pen in the room does not have ink. The only other writing utensil in the room is a pencil, which won’t do for this type of document.
Instead of contacting the hotel front desk to ask for a pen (which is what most people would do), Tobias (in a very contrived movie situation) walks outside in his bathrobe to the nearest convenience store. Just as he’s about to walk back to the hotel, he gets accidentally hit by a car on the street. Tobias ends up in a hospital with injuries, including having to wear a neck brace.
In a hospital waiting room area, Tobias strikes up a somewhat flirty, somewhat awkward conversation with a woman seated nearby. This woman is Almut. Their attraction to each other is immediate. And he soon finds out, as Almut tells him, that she was the one who accidentally hit him with her car.
And so begins the romance of Almut (who is fiery and outspoken) and Tobias (who is polite and patient), who have a whirlwind courtship. It’s already shown in the movie’s trailer and other marketing materials that Almut and Tobias becoming doting and loving parents to a daughter. Her name is Ella. In the movie, Ella is only seen as a baby and as a child who’s about 3 or 4 years old (played by Grace Delaney) in 2023.
“We Live in Time” shows the various stages of this romance, from courtship to parenthood. The movie shows whether or not Almut and Tobias get married. On their first date, Almut invites Tobias to her restaurant, where he is served a meal that she prepared herself. Tobias tells her that he’s newly divorced. He already knows that she’s single and available too. And then, they go back to her place and hook up.
The morning after their first sexual encounter, Tobias sees photos of Almut and her ex-lover Adrienne Duvall (played by Marama Corlett) and is immediately accepting that Almut is not heterosexual. Almut doesn’t state what her sexuality is but she tells Tobias that Adrienne was a former co-worker. Almut doesn’t go into details about why her romance with Adrienne ended. Tobias opens up about his divorce and says he and his ex-wife Helen split up because Helen got a job in Sweden, and he wanted to stay in London, but there were problems in the marriage before she moved to Sweden.
After Tobias and Almut have a few more dates, the subject comes up about how Tobias and Almut feel about becoming parents. Almut says that she and Adrienne thought about starting a family together, but Almut has decided she doesn’t want to have kids. Tobias is taken aback because he says he probably wants to become a father at some point in his life.
Almut gets very defensive because she thinks Tobias is rushing this conversation so soon in their relationship. Tobias tells her that he might be falling love with her but he doesn’t want the relationship to end in heartbreak because they can’t agree on wanting to have kids. This conversation leads to Tobias and Almut having their first big argument.
Of course, it’s already revealed that Almut changed her mind about becoming a parent. Viewers find out if Almut got pregnant before or after she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Almut is seen in various stages of her pregnancy, including an extended childbirth scene that is both amusing and touching.
“We Live in Time” is quite uneven in revealing other aspects of Almut and Tobias. The movie tells much more about Almut’s career and younger life than Tobias’ career and younger life. Almut, her protégée Jade Khadime (played by Lee Braithwaite) and their colleague Simon Maxon (played by Adam James) enter Bocuse d’Or, a prestigious international chef competition, which is a big subplot in the movie. By contrast, Tobias is briefly seen working a few times in the movie. It would be easy to forget that he has a job because he’s barely seen at his job in “We Live in Time.”
Almut’s family life also gets more details in the movie than Tobias’ family life. At one point in the movie, Almut and Tobias have dinner with their respective families at the home of Almut’s widowed mother Sylvia (played by Niamh Cusack). Tobias’ architect father Reginald Durand (played by Douglas Hodge) is a widower. Nothing else is revealed about Tobias’ family or his childhood.
Almut and Tobias seem to have great relationships with their families, but Almut has lingering emotional pain over her father’s death. (His cause of death is not mentioned.) Almut gets upset at this family dinner when her family shows videos of Almut being a champion ice skater when she was a teenager. Almut later tells Tobias that her father was the one who encouraged her to become an ice skater, but she quit the sport after he died. Almut says this is why it’s hard for her to look at videos of herself ice skating.
“We Live in Time” has a reality disconnect in the scenes where Almut has Stage 3 ovarian cancer. Almut is supposed to be close to her family, so it’s strange and unrealistic that her mother and other family members are nowhere to be seen when she is undergoing cancer treatment. Tobias is her only adult family support in these scenes. And in the scene where Almut is in childbirth labor and on her way to a hospital with Tobias, their family members aren’t contacted to let them know she’s about to give birth.
But the biggest disconnect is how Almut doesn’t show any physical decline when she has Stage 3 overian cancer and when she’s undergoing chemotherapy in the cancer scenes. Sure, there’s a scene where Almut shaves her head into a buzzcut to prepare for chemotherapy. But, quite frankly, during the worst of her cancer, Almut still looks like a healthy movie star.
“We Live in Time” should have had more realism about how the human body can be ravaged by cancer and chemotherapy. All that viewers will see in “We Live in Time” about actual physical effects of cancer is Almut vomiting on a few occasions. (Almut talking about surgery options is not the same thing as showing physical effects of cancer.) The movie doesn’t make having cancer look glamorous, but it downplays or ignores a lot of the physical deterioriation caused by cancer and the worst side effects of cancer treatment.
Despite these flaws, “We Live in Time” benefits from having the talented performances of Pugh and Garfield, who shine as a couple that viewers will want to see succeed. “We Live in Time” has some sex scenes that are filmed with a romantic tone and are meant for mature audiences. And because this is a love story where someone has cancer, expect to see some tearjerking moments. Although “We Live in Time” flubs a lot of the cancer medical aspects of the story, the movie gets the relationship aspects right, and that’s what will stay with this movie’s viewers the most.
A24 released “We Live in Time” in select U.S. cinemas on October 11, 2024, with an expansion to more U.S. cinemas on October 18, 2024.
